What is Heaven Like?

[deacon blues]

For me, heaven has always been a hoped for ideal. LDS teachings emphasize families and propagation of gods and worlds. I imagine it as a place of healing and learning. I visualize Martin Luther King and Ezra Taft Benson discussing their careers on earth with an enhanced, eternal view. I picture poor broken souls like Gary Gilmore and Adolph Hitler being somehow healed. (Perhaps decades, centuries, or even eons of loving experiences could do it!) I see me and my family members recalling disagreements as the trifles they are, and growing in learning and understanding. It's likely that some of my vision comes from the teachings I have absorbed in the church. I have hope for such a heaven, and this hope influences my daily actions to some degree.
Does anyone else think about stuff like this?

Did Joseph Smith's concept of heaven dictate his actions? Or, did his feelings and actions dictate the concept on heaven that he taught?

[Palerider]

I like to think it’s initially just a huge rush of joy and an expansion of mental and emotional capacity. A reunion of amazing proportions.

But along with that comes or returns a major communications faculty. Once we get past that initial WOW factor and are spiritually filled with the love of God, I don't know for sure if we will even care about all of the trivial crap that happened on earth. But if we do, I don't think there will be any "lying" in Paradise. There will be perfectly unfettered truth and knowledge communicated between us and no one will be able to hide or slant or spin what part they played in any given transaction here on earth. Even our deepest thoughts and feelings we had at the time will be readily reviewable. No hiding the truth anymore. A great deal of heartfelt apologizing and understanding will likely take place.

After the resurrection I think as Paul said, it's impossible for mortals to imagine what a sublime existence awaits us in Heaven. Life with God is going to be anything but boring. Think about it. You're coexisting along with all of your family and friends, with the absolutely most creative Power that exists independently of all other things, even the Universe itself. Time is no more. Pain and tears are no more. A state of being and joy outside our current capacity to fully comprehend. I don't know if "fun" is an appropriate descriptor here but yeah, I think we're really going to enjoy that experience.

And this experience of earth life will have only enhanced our appreciation of that experience. I think we will see that every second of our existence here will have been well worth what might have been or seemed like excruciating pain at the time.

God's ability to heal is SO beyond our imaginings.

Regarding the Hitlers and the Stalins. The Ted Bundles and Charlie Mansons. The brutal spouse abusers and abusers of children.....I'm going to let God take care of that. He knows every thought they ever had and what their upbringing was like. He knows whether they were victims themselves or if their hearts just loved evil. He knows precisely what their capacity to choose was when the time for decision arrived.

I don't doubt God's capacity for equity and justice.

[Angel]

Great thread! I think it is great therapy to define heaven for ourselves, rather than having those concepts dictated by another.

I will second the view of heaven being a place of togetherness - where everyone has come to the knowledge they need to overcome past imperfections

For me, there are no divisions in heaven. Not different degrees of glory, no outer darkness - I could not be happy in an eternal hierarchy...

A place for fun - extreme sports without hospital visits
A place for creation - creating worlds, and creating life.
A place of being connected - where we can see everyone face-to-face, where we can know as we are known...

I do believe existence is eternal - that nothing magically appears or disappears into nothingness - we have always existed, and will always exist - changing forms... and through eternity, we should all be able to come to the most amazing states possible, right?

[moksha]

When we go to bed in heaven on our anti-gravity mattresses, we will find a freshly placed Coffee Nip on our bedside tables.

[EternityIsNow]

Heaven is just a change of our surroundings. We will be pretty much the same conscious beings we are here. We are already in the eternities. In the middle of them. The interesting thing about my experience going to heaven and back once when I was very sick, was that it was still me. 100% me, my knowledge, my consciousness, my self-awareness, exactly the same as being a human. But without the Clay body around me. Without the pain or the sense of being entangled in the human biome.

Here is my take, based on personal experience plus a lot of study. We are not actually human beings. We are some sort of conscious particle of the source energy of the universe that is currently inhabiting a thinking animal. Here on earth we think about heaven the way a thinking animal would imagine things. Eternal bliss, endless food, companionship, beauty, acceptance by a heavenly alpha character created by animal mythology. But once we are actually there, the game changes for us. Because our conscious being is not human. Not at all. In a sense, we are alien beings inhabiting an animal, almost like in a science-fiction story.

Based on what I have learned, the real Heaven will be a temporary state where we transition from believing we are human, back to our original form. We are just on vacation here on earth. We find humans interesting and wanted to experience human life. The ongoing eternity for us will not be about continuing to propagate some sort of human state of awareness in eternal human bliss. We may want that for a brief period, as part of processing this life. But to continue caring about one human experience, our most recent life, would eventually become boring to us. We will process the life we just had, visit with others like us who were important to us as they return, visit with friends on the other side who we missed while we were on earth, get therapy for the more traumatizing parts of the experience just had, and get interventions if we were a particularly negative person, then eventually move on. Either to other human lives with friends we have on the other side, or on to other experiences all together.

We are eternal explorers. Exploring a vast multi dimensional universe created by a single source being. We experience everything we want to understand. I don't believe we are actually progressing the way humans think of it. We already know everything on the other side. And we are not trying to get through time because that is also arbitrary on the other side. What we are doing is experiencing an evolving universe. From many different perspectives. And we will continue doing that as long as this universe lasts. After which we will collectively create something else to explore.

[wtfluff]

"Heaven" is right here, right now, during those fleeting moments of bliss.

Unfortunately "Hell" is right here, right now in the same way...

[Reuben]

I've sometimes entertained the thought that when a person dies, God wakes from dreaming about being that person, commits the person's life to memory, and then sleeps again, to dream about being the next person. Or maybe the dreams are really a simulation, or the memories of beings without inherent qualia in what to God is a low-dimensional pocket universe. It doesn't really matter.

In my imagination, when God has experienced all of our trillions of lives, from the emergence of intelligence in our most brutal years to the end of our desperate collective fight to survive in the long gray death of the universe, he kicks it back with his buddy, Steve. When Steve asks him whether all those lives were worth living, God hears the thundering of trillions of human voices calling out from his memories, shouting as one, "We would do it all again."

Then God says, "Just pour me another one, Steve."

[moksha]

“The Kingdom of God does not come in such a way as to be seen. No one will say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’; because the Kingdom of God is within you.”

On the other hand, Humanists have suggested we must work together make our own heaven on earth if we are to see it.